After just one season in town, K.T. Turner is on his way out, per a report. On Monday evening, news started to make way across the bird app surrounding Kentucky's assistant coach, unofficially announcing that he is headed to receive his first head coaching gig back in lone-star state.
UT Arlington had just recently fired their men's basketball head coach, Greg Young, who was in just his second year and had six games remaining in the regular season before the school's departure. After the 9-16 start, Royce Johnson was named interim head coach for the rest of the season. As their offseason is already here, it looks like they know exactly who they want as their next guy at the throne.
K.T. has spent most of his career in the state of Texas as he has made some of his first coaching stops at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, Hutchinson Community College, Cowley College, Redlands Community College and Panola Community College. He also spent some time at SMU and Texas as well, before heading to Oklahoma, the school he was at before Kentucky. Once Jai Lucas left the staff to head to Duke last summer, John Calipari made the call to Turner to try and instantly replace the strength lost in the Texas recruiting community. Although he was expected to recruit very well here, he has yet to bring a recruit to Kentucky since his first class would be coming in next year. So, after a quick nine months, it looks like we won't ever get to know if he was the man for the job or not.
Many often ask how a coach would ever leave a blue-blood program to go back to such a small program but what most people don't understand is that all of these guy's want to be a head coach somewhere. That's their ultimate goal. Climbing up the ranks in the assistant world to one day get the keys to their own program is what they're chasing. Well, here's K.T.'s chance. While he was usually quiet in the public eye, and I feel as if we didn't get to know him too well, I hope he finds a lot of success down there.